Special Report

On Separating Children From Parents and Incarcerating Orphans for Life Without Parole

What if Attorney General Sessions had prosecuted the Menendez Brothers?

It never ends, does it? The hypocrisy, the outright lies, and the way that every single news item is spun one way during the Obama and Clinton presidencies and the opposite way during the Trump presidency.

Obama had promised, from the majesty of two cardboard or papier-mâché Greek or Roman columns borrowed from a Harvey Weinstein-like prop studio, that his election would see the oceans stop rising and the planet heal. Without having accomplished much more than voting “present” at some Illinois state legislature events, forging powerful alliances with Louis Farrakhan, Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayres, and convicted felon Anthony Rezko, Obama ended up getting a Nobel Peace Prize. And the Seedier Media could not be more thrilled up the leg. By contrast, President Trump forges an unprecedented and improbable first step towards breaking a half-century logjam with North Korea, and the left media responds with derision and pronouncements of failure.

But those media did not pronounce failure when Obama gave away the family store, the family farm, and half the bank with Iran. Secret cash flights of billions in greenbacks as ransom, secret promises of access to American financial institutions — all wonderful. Peace in our time. To be sure, the American people not only were dubious of it all but were so skeptical that Obama did not dare press their Congressional representatives, not even Democrats, to ratify his Iran Deal as a treaty. It was a farce from the outset, even worse when the subsequent disclosures emerged of how much we gave away for how little we received. But the Seedier Media loved it. A real peacemaker.

And compare the reaction to President Trump opening new vistas to the Sunni Arab world.

The Seedier Media are aflutter: But Trump is meeting with a tyrant, a dictator. How can we countenance that?

The CNN obsession with Stormy Daniels who, at best, is a pornography professional and public liar who has changed her stories several times to describe, at its very worst, a seedy consensual affair… contrasted with the same Seedier Media total blackout for years on everything from Bill Clinton’s lip-biting rape of Juanita Broaddrick (no, the rape was not consensual), the forced open-zipper obscenity imposed on Paula Corbin Jones, the forced grabbing and sexual advance on Kathleen Willey when this very decent and then-vulnerable woman, then-just-recently recently widowed after her husband’s traumatically sudden death, approached the President for assistance. Two different worlds of ethics, of morals, of values. To this day, if it were not for the cynical self-aggrandizing political machinations of people like Presidential-aspirant New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, combined with the Democrat Party’s wholesale abandonment of Clinton stock and souvenirs, Bill still would be free to wander over women. But, as he himself ruefully now concedes: norms have changed “for what you can do to somebody against their will.” (Sigh!)

It just never ends, the double standard. In the world of “Black Lives Matter,” where a thug who stole brazenly from convenience stores and tried to wrestle a gun from a cop in his police car got shot to death, the media went wild: but he was peaceful and said “Hands up don’t shoot!” Right. Ferguson, Missouri burned down over that lie, a mendacity that a grand jury shot through with more holes than the criminal whose demise launched the sordid affair. The liberals never have been at the forefront of defending the decency of the law-enforcement officers who risk their lives, night and day, to protect them. And yet, suddenly, Democrats have found their true love: the FBI. Suddenly, from Schumer to Pelosi to Schiff to the whole bunch of them, nothing in America is more sacred to Democrats than the FBI. We must respect our law enforcement agency, they lecture us. Yes, you may — you should — kneel at the playing of the national anthem if you like. You may use the “F” word to speak of the President of the United States, and you will reap thunderous applause from the clapping seals in the echo… echo… chamber… chamber of Broadway. Use the “C” word to describe the elegant and dignified daughter of the President. Kathy Griffin, once an employed unfunny “comic” who lost her job after losing her head, now is so desperate for a laugh, a “hi” sign from anyone anywhere — even the ephemeral Zen Koan of the sound of even only one hand clapping — that she now tweets her own “F” word to describe the President’s wife, figuring that if it worked to get headlines for De Niro, it might work for her. But of course it will not because, as every funny comedian knows: (i) a joke is never as funny a week after everyone has heard it repeated fifty times; and (ii) jokes are best when they are original or, at least, sound like they might be. So Kathy is back to banging her head.

All of which brings us to the Menendez Brothers. Huh?

Remember them — Lyle and Erik? They were gifted by life with wealth, fabulous looks, stardom, connections, success — and then they got tired of collecting one gold coin at a time from the golden geese that laid those golden eggs, so they just went ahead and murdered their parents. Well, they got caught. (It happens sometimes.) They were tried and convicted and sentenced to life in prison without a possibility of parole. And that does seem the least the justice system could justly do for patricide in a state like California, where the death penalty is reserved primarily for elderly people who get pressured by their caretakers to sign a form permitting premature administering of morphine and assisted suicide.

But here’s the thing: If the Menendez Boys had been prosecuted by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the leftist media would have reacted differently. CNN instead would be airing hour-long television specials, augmented by a coordinated New York Times front-page series, titled: “Why is the Trump Justice Department Seeking Life Sentences Against Orphans?” There would be film of homeless orphans in Croatia. Starving orphans depicted as prisoners in a Homeland Security lock-up, but only later revealed to be film outtakes from the 1968 release of Lionel Bart’s and Carol Reed’s Academy Award winning musical, Oliver! And yet the campaign would be unleashed to free the two fellows who murdered their mom and dad in bed: “Free the Orphans!”

Religious leaders would be rounded up by the activists: Sign now, or we will boycott your church. Sign now, or we will disrupt your lives. Indeed, in the Jewish community — my home base — it gets insane enough that the Leftists suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome even go on social media to threaten rabbis engaged in certifying foods as kosher: “Either you condemn Attorney General Sessions now, or we will refuse to eat foods that you certify as kosher!”

1. This country has borders. It must enforce its borders. Lax border control exposes this country to three overriding perils that should concern coherent liberals every bit as much as it does conservatives, and it further should concern Maxine Waters and Nancy Pelosi:

(i) Porous borders are the source of unmitigated illegal smuggling of toxic opioids into this country, leading to a national death epidemic;

(ii) Porous borders are the source for massive human trafficking, particularly in women and children for prostitution, not women willingly opting to ply that trade but victimized and unsuspecting women and children who are kidnapped by “coyotes” who make them false promises that they will be successfully secreted into America but who instead get hustled off the radar of their frantic families and loved ones, moved endlessly from town to town in this country, their humanity destroyed; and

2. We already separate children from their parents when we incarcerate their fathers (or mothers) for crimes. The prisons are jammed with broken families whose parents have taken calculated risks resulting in being separated predictably from their children. A married dad who holds up a bank. A married dad who rapes and, unlike President Clinton, is caught and punished for his crime. A married dad who cheats on his taxes and is punished in prison. It happens all the time, too often. But what is the alternative?

3. People take calculated risks, and they knowingly separate themselves from their children. Men who wish to serve this great nation in the most noble way join our armed forces, and they sometimes fight in Afghanistan and Iraq or are stationed in Germany, Japan, and on the Korea divide. We could tell them, as we did with the family of Private Ryan when our country had a limit on how many sons we dared allow a family potentially to lose in one war, that our country has adopted a policy that we will not allow fathers and their children to be separated. But that is not our policy, and we do not look upon that sacrifice as evil when a man voluntarily enlists, leaving behind children to wait and hope for his safe and speedy return.

4. Jewish parents in 1930s and 1940s Europe took terrible risks for their children and sent them off to hide, separated from their families, all alone, with Righteous Gentile neighbors, or they sent them on boats and ships to flee Germany for their lives while the parents stayed behind. This is the result of a world with terrible cruelty, where people have to make decisions as to what is best for themselves and their children. It is a terrible part of our reality. Likewise, the families knowingly trying to break our immigration laws now, at a time when we also allow millions to enter legally, are gambling and making calculated risks that their kids will be better off if they grab them and try to sneak through illegally. It is a calculated risk. We are reminded even of the Clinton Administration and Attorney General Janet Reno’s brutalization of Elian Gonzalez, the boy from Cuba who almost got to stay in America, but whom the Clinton Government tore away from his family in Florida to “reunite” with his father in Cuba after Elian’s mother died, drowning on her ill-fated journey seeking escape to America from Castro’s Hell.

5. The Left are the ones who always said during the Bush years — and the non-neoconservatives among us always have agreed — that America is not the world’s policeman. It does not fall on the United States to solve the world’s every problem. Yes, there is a heightened social obligation to allow entry of refugees facing certain death at the hands of persecutors committed to murdering people based on their membership in certain demographic groups. United States immigration law grants asylum to such people. 8 C.F.R. § 208.13. But the recent liberal-newsmedia tear-jerkers are different. This country has no obligation to and must not admit every person who claims that a spouse or parent is beating them up in Guatemala or even that they need to come in because they got on the wrong side of the drug cartels in Mexico or Ecuador. We cannot do this. No country can. There is too much evil in the world — look at the United Nations General Assembly vote the other day in which three-quarters of the world voted to condemn Israel in her struggle to ward off Hamas terrorists, while all the gutless cowards of Europe abstained (except for France, who voted with the terrorists). If we take everyone in, then we get swallowed up. When a country moves towards immigration anarchy, it ends up with the most horrific of terror attacks as in France and with 14-year-old girls getting raped and murdered in Germany — something that this country blessedly has managed to avoid so far, for the most part.

It is moral and ethical to preserve the nuclear family. The Democrats under Lyndon Johnson created a welfare system half a century ago, and which they mostly revived under Obama, that utterly destroyed the American nuclear family in many parts of our great society, condemning generations of young men to grow up without fathers. We know that result: crime, incarceration, lost generations, poverty, single-parent homes headed by wonderful women with a lifetime to contemplate their own lost dreams. We conservatives are pro-life. We oppose partial-birth abortion. We oppose inducing suicide among the elderly. We insist on school choice so that all children can have the same educational opportunities that the children of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Barack and Michelle Obama had when their presidential parents leveraged their wealth and influence to keep their kids out of the public schools. We want kids to be with their parents. We run and support homes that seek to place orphans with parents who will love and care for them. Who would ever — if honest — stoop to suggest that conservatives, of all people, are soft on the powerful role of the bonded preserved nuclear family?

We must not be deceived by cynically false mercy and crocodile tears into becoming a society that is overrun by murderous opioids, by “coyotes” perpetrating unbridled human trafficking in unsuspecting kidnapped women and children, and by terrorists entering undetected. If the law ever becomes so diverted that no one can be imprisoned if they enter our southern border illegally with a child in tow, then each and every aspiring illegal immigrant henceforth will rent or buy a child en route to the border if they have none of their own. And such misplaced “mercy” will prove to have been as cynical as it would be to demand that the Menendez Brothers be released on the humanitarian grounds that, having murdered their parents, they are orphans.